The MacArthur Foundation has named Sarah T. Stewart, a planetary scientist at UC Davis, who has developed novel theories about the formation of the Earth and moon, among the 2018 class of MacArthur Fellows.

Sometimes known as the “Genius Grants,” the MacArthur Fellowship is a $625,000 award to extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential.

“It’s fitting that this prestigious no-strings-attached award goes to Professor Stewart because her curiosity and ingenuity know no bounds,” said UCD Chancellor Gary S. May. “I am thrilled for recognition this brings to her and our university community as a whole.”

Stewart is a professor in the university’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, College of Letters and Science, who studies how planets form, developing new ideas about the evolution of the Earth and other planets. Her newly built Shockwave Compression Laboratory uses what are essentially mounted cannons to reproduce conditions reached during the violent collisions that form planets. The experiments fuel novel ideas into how the Earth and moon formed, and help scientists better understand planets outside our solar system.

The fellowship is awarded over five years and is a personal grant that the recipient can use however they see fit. Stewart said that while she does not yet have a specific project in mind, she hopes to use the funds for something “new and different.”

“I want to use it to enable something exciting that I haven’t had a chance to do yet,” Stewart said.

Recently, Stewart and colleagues developed a new theory of the origin of the Earth and moon. Previous thinking held that the moon was stripped out of the Earth when another planet-sized object struck the Earth a glancing blow. But there are discrepancies between this model and the observed composition of the Earth and moon.

Stewart and graduate student Simon Lock proposed instead that the Earth and moon formed from an entirely new kind of celestial object, a gigantic spinning doughnut of vaporized and molten rock that they call a synestia. They showed how a synestia could be created from a high-energy collision between two planet-sized objects with high angular momentum.

“We are so pleased that Sarah Stewart is among the small cohort of 2018 MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’ recipients,” said College of Letters and Science Dean Elizabeth Spiller. “Sarah’s creative and distinguished scholarship enlarges the boundaries of what is possible; we are honored that the award recognizes the kind of curiosity-driven research and impact at the heart of everything we do in the college.”

Stewart received an A.B. (1995) from Harvard University and a Ph.D. (2002) from the California Institute of Technology. She was a professor at Harvard University from 2003 to 2014 before joining the faculty at UCD.

Stewart is the third MacArthur fellow on the UCD faculty. The others are Professor Leah Krubitzer, Department of Psychology and Center for Neuroscience, and Geerat Vermeij, distinguished professor of paleobiology in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, both in the College of Letters and Science.

Stewart was one of 25 people, including academics, activists, artists, scholars and scientists, who were recognized.

The Chicago-based foundation has awarded the fellowships each year since 1981 to people who have shown outstanding talent to help further their creative, professional or intellectual pursuits. Potential fellows are brought to the foundation’s attention by an anonymous pool of nominators. Those selected are sworn to secrecy until their names are announced.

Los Angeles Philharmonic first violinist Vijay Gupta said he was “pretty overwhelmed” when he told he was named a MacArthur fellow. He received the honor for being the co-founder and artistic director of Street Symphony, which has performed at homeless shelters, jails and halfway houses for about eight years.

“They have reminded me why I became a musician,” Gupta said of the homeless. “Artists have a role in telling the truth about what is happening in our world today.”

Gupta, 31, said he got the idea for Street Symphony while giving lessons to Nathaniel Ayers, a Juilliard-trained musician whose mental illness led to homelessness and who was the inspiration for the movie “The Soloist.”

“I grew up around mental illness,” Gupta said, noting that he has experienced it. “Our goal is to find more artists aching to have not only their artistry, but also have their human story told as well.”

Gupta, who won a spot in the LA Philharmonic at age 19, said he has no idea how he will spend the money, but that it gives him the opportunity to reflect.

Another fellow is Rebecca Sandefur, an associate professor of sociology and law at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She was told of the award by the MacArthur Fellows Program’s managing director, Cecilia Conrad, who happened to be on campus and had asked to meet about an unrelated matter.

“It was an extraordinary experience and a complete shock,” Sandefur said. “It was not something you would expect.”

Sandefur’s research is promoting a new approach to increasing access to the justice system by poor communities. She created the first national mapping of civil legal aid providers, revealing which states had the resources to provide such aid and which didn’t. She also determined that cost is only one of many factors that inhibit the use of lawyers by the poor. Among the others are an aversion to lawyers, a fear of and pessimism about the fairness of the legal system, and a lack of understanding about what constitutes a legal issue.

Sandefur, 47, contends that while there has been a lot of attention paid to the problems of the criminal justice system, there hasn’t been enough attention paid to the civil side of the law.

“It affects millions of people as well,” she said. “A person could lose a house or get evicted, not see kids after a divorce proceeding or get unemployment insurance that they are owed.”

Sandefur said the award would be important in helping advance her work.

“We are going get some action on a problem that’s been around a long time,” she said.